/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */
package org.apache.geode.annotations;

import java.lang.annotation.Documented;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;

/**
 * Signifies that a public API (public class, method or field) is subject to
 * incompatible changes, or even removal, in a future release. An API bearing
 * this annotation is exempt from any compatibility guarantees made by its
 * containing library. 
 * 
 * <p>Note that the presence of this annotation implies nothing
 * about the quality or performance of the API in question, only the fact that
 * it is not "API-frozen."
 *
 * <p>It is generally safe for <i>applications</i> to depend on beta APIs, at
 * the cost of some extra work during upgrades. However, it is generally
 * inadvisable for <i>libraries</i> (which get included on users' class paths,
 * outside the library developers' control) to do so.
 * 
 * <p>Inspired by similar annotations in JGroups, Spark, DataflowJavaSDK.
 */
@Documented
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target({
  ElementType.ANNOTATION_TYPE,
  ElementType.CONSTRUCTOR, 
  ElementType.FIELD, 
  ElementType.METHOD, 
  ElementType.PACKAGE,
  ElementType.TYPE})
public @interface Experimental {
  
  /** Optional description */
  String value() default "";
  
}
